How To Increase Consumer Engagement Using Infographics With Brian Wallace

Brian Wallace is the Founder and President of NowSourcing, an award-winning and nationally recognized infographic design agency creating visual and influential marketing content. Brian has been named a Google Small Business Advisor since 2016 and joined the SXSW (South by Southwest) advisory board in 2019. He’s a mentor for Startup Weekend Louisville and was a volunteer community organizer for #ThinkBig, an initiative to transform Louisville into a flourishing start-up community.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Brian Wallace shares his professional experience and how he founded NowSourcing
Understanding long-form explanatory content and its appeal to consumers
How total addressable marketing can impact an entire industry
Brian provides an example of how defining a market affects business strategy
Why influence without respect is risky
How can brands build an influential platform and add value to the media?
Common reasons an infographic fails
The three main types of links in link-building
Brian discloses how family dynamics and past traumas have influenced his perspective
Why a generous character builds intimacy in relationships

In this episode…

The marketing industry has become saturated with unproductive content, so advertising strategies must be developed methodically. Content creation is the focal point of digital marketing, but brands overlook the value of long-form explanatory content and infographics, which creates a persuasive narrative for the consumer. How can you entice your audience with infographic content when short-form narratives are easier and quicker to consume?

People in the e-commerce industry believe infographics are synonymous with product listings — a widely believed misconception. Infographics produce long-form explanatory content laying out a detailed narrative for the consumer. Brian Wallace, an infographic expert, explains the value of creating a story rather than telling the audience why your product is necessary. Infographics are a strategic way to captivate your target audience and boost your business’ reach.

On this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris welcomes Brian Wallace, Founder and President of NowSourcing, to discuss how leveraging infographics can increase consumer engagement. Brian explains how influential brands can add value to the media. He also shares the scenarios where an infographic would be an unsuccessful marketing attempt.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode...

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now, let's get started with the Show.

William Harris 0:15

Hey everybody, it's William Harris here. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt. And the host of this podcast where I feature experts in the D2C industry sharing strategies on how to scale your business and achieve your goals. Today, the guests that I have that I'm excited to share with you is Brian Wallace. Brian is the founder and president of NowSourcing an industry leading content marketing agency that makes the world's ideas simple, visual and influential. Brian has been named a Google Small Business Advisor for 2016 through present, and he joined the South by Southwest advisory board and 2019. Still currently there as well. And I believe we met if I remember correctly, we were talking about this before it was through a Facebook group. All things social media, Troy Asana for ran that we were debating whether it was his or Jordan French's group, but I, I think we agree that it was through choice group. But Brian, I'm excited to have you here today.

Brian Wallace 1:07

Always a pleasure, William, I feel like we could probably record most of our conversations have that as the podcast, so we might as well invite everybody in?

William Harris 1:15

Absolutely, yes. Yeah. So I do want to make sure I make a quick announcement of our sponsor here. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency, optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired with the largest one selling for nearly 800 million. And we were ranked as the 12th fastest growing agency in the world by Adweek. That said, enough of the boring stuff. I want to get into the good stuff. Brian, how did you end up doing what you do NowSourcing into to give a little bit more backstory? I've worked with you now on several of these. And I've seen firsthand, there's, there's infographics that are just silly things that people do. And then there are infographics that actually get results and work. And so maybe you want to talk quickly about like what that is, but then also you're into like, how did you decide that you wanted to be the infographic guy?

Brian Wallace 2:11

Yeah, so I didn't just wake up one day when I was a kid, and everybody else is going through and they're like, I want to be a police officer, I want to be a fighter. I want to make graphics and teacher be like, What the heck is that kid? Yeah, to hear Go to the principal's office. So no, that wasn't like a lifelong dream. I actually began my career in technology. And I found that I really did not enjoy technology. So you know, fingers crossed, that like Riverside is going to work. And everybody can hear the patch. Everything works and somebody doesn't ring the bell, and the dog comes in whatever technological nightmare, I found that the promise of technology is really fascinating and wonderful. But a lot of times when rubber meets the road technology leaves a lot to be desired to put it nicely. So after almost a decade of doing a number of different things in a variety of roles, I really did not want to work in pure technology anymore. And I also kind of wanted to get away from the East Coast. I'm originally born and raised in New York metro area. So my wife and I started NowSourcing almost 17 long depending on when you're listening to this podcast, but at the time that we're recording, almost 17 years ago. And very early on. We were a social media agency, because I understood and appreciated the technical logical side of how things tick. But I also was really fascinated in how humans think and act and people act the way they do. And is it really easy to change perception? Well, it's not easy, but it is very possible to change perception, because I think a lot of people have all these strongly held opinions that they marched around and angrily disagree with each other, and Facebook, that kind of easy to operate. So when you think about all of the influence, and I know we'll get into all the influence later, I think that there's a lot that can be said about how to not just manipulate but give people better choices out there. So instead of just pure tech, social in the early days was like perfect for like me, my brain where I think because it's sort of being good at all the social elements of society, and the technological side. So early on, we're social media agency worked for a lot of big names. And then it just got to be too busy, too noisy all over the place. Everybody thought that there were social media expert, whichever that even means it was exploding in so many directions. So one day, we just kind of sat down with the team and we're like, alright, what are we really good at? We have a knack for storytelling. We're good at doing it in a visual manner. And we're good at some sense of going viral, whatever that means. And we can argue vociferously about what the heck of virality is, if it's always a good thing, but we'll get into some of the better aspects of it. But when we roll all of that together, I found that while most of the world was focused on the housing crisis, destroying the world, we found a brand new thing that maybe there were two people in the world do thing in 2008. That was infographics, I said, Wow, this is perfect for all the stuff that we're good at. And this really is not a mature industry yet, not a lot of people are doing it, even the people who are doing it aren't really doing it right. Just making silly graphics, not making it professional enough, not editing it, not really having it reached the desired effect, because it is not a bucket list item before you die, right? Just make a graphic and call it a day. You make it so it does something for your company, hard stop.

William Harris 5:32

Well, and that's why so before we get too far into like, the psychosocial stuff, which I think that there are some exciting things that you and I do want to talk about, I want to really just level set this for anybody who's listening, if you run an e-commerce Store, or any store, SAS, business, whatever, but you know, we're aimed towards this. You You probably need one of Brian's infographics and I'm selling this hard because I've seen the effect of this now for number of different companies that I have worked with to do this. And I'm actually just gonna pull one up. So I want people to understand the difference between what you're doing here and what they might be thinking of when they just, you know, blandly hear infographics so should be able to see my screen here. This is when we did it Sellbrite, so Sellbrite SAS company. And we sold this to godaddy a few years ago. And a big part of what Sellbrite did was listing and inventory management for e-commerce brands across Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Shopify. And so one of the biggest keywords that we really wanted to dig into was we wanted people who were Amazon sellers to join the software, right? That's, that's the kind of the group. And if you think about it, just from a very reductive standpoint, we're looking for, you know, helping people manage their listings on Amazon, and that can be okay, that's the exact target. But that's not the thing that people are the most likely to share. From a newsworthiness standpoint, from an infographic standpoint, and this is where you came in. And I won't try to steal the thunder here on this, but you came out to help us rethink the magnitude of what we were trying to do in order to get significant links backs. And I believe we ended up with something like over 300 quality links pointing to this one, within a relatively, you know, couple of weeks period of time, maybe it was, you know, four weeks or something like that, from the Wall Street Journal, and you know, a lot of other very just good domains that you wanted. And this is much better than going out and trying to buy links, or whatever else people are trying to do. If you're looking to build up authority, this can be a massive way to build up authority around some certain keywords you wanted. And so what was the thought process around this one, and how you helped us to, you know, move out from our narrow thinking on that?

Brian Wallace 7:54

Sure. So it's a great point, the way that you've set this up, I think a lot of people do not really understand long form explanatory content. So a lot of people when they're in the e-commerce game, they think an infographic is a product listing, I see a lot of that word synonymous, at least in the e-commerce world. So understand that when William and I are discussing this, if you're looking at this on the screen or not. This is a very long scroll that could be chopped up interstitial, whatever you're gonna do. But imagine it more as a function of reading time. sweetspot on this is probably a good to at least two, two and a half, three minutes, maybe even two, five minutes, by the time you consume everything. So this isn't just a couple of bullet points. This is an entire narrative. So the first thing that we were thinking about when we truly tried to understand who the target market was, is that there's probably a much larger addressable meaning and market than just saying, hey, existing Amazon sellers use these cool powered tools by this company that you may or may not heard of yet. There are many other people that probably envy the growth of Amazon don't even know that there is a thing called a third party seller market, they think they're just buying from Amazon, wherever the heck that means. I mean, hopefully people don't think that but you'd be surprised they do. So helping people understand several levels and layers of abstraction to really what the overall message is, rather than let's focus on who are the existing who are the big third party sellers, what categories can you focus on what's the best revenue, blah, blah, blah, instead of worrying about all of the ingredients to success? I think what we're actually trying to focus on is what is the story behind it? That's human emotion motional and relatable, that if I am not, all the way invested in this could skill still catch my eye from some gigantic publication? And in this case, the Crown at the top, the headline the header, the sentence at the top app says,

William Harris 10:02

and I think you have it up there, how Amazon makes its money

Brian Wallace 10:05

on makes its money. So even if you're not an Amazon, third party seller, even if you don't know what that is, even if you might be considering it, and you go all the way to the top, you probably if you exist on planet Earth in the year 2023, you know what Amazon is, and you're probably curious how they make money, they make it through a lot of different streams, we show their overall growth and power. And then as we go through the narrative, it starts to funnel closer into focus of what the main objective at hand is, which is to get the power for that, to get all the published publications on it, and to get everybody linking back to it.

William Harris 10:41

Because, you know, if, if we're talking, hey, I'd love to get a link back from the Wall Street Journal, if I'm going to make this about product listings, it's never going to happen. They don't care about linking to my article about product listings. And the reality is, you probably have some decent SEO, you know, already built out around whatever your core, your core business is. And so if it's product listings, or whatever that might be your core product as an e-commerce Store, you already have some decent SEO already built up to it. But that's maybe you know, maybe there's 1000 people a month that are looking for that particular keyword or whatever that might be. And that's where we look at how do you expand that out to what's the relevant thing for this? And so for this, it's the idea of let's just even say, at the highest level, how do we get Google to associate Sellbrite with Amazon, we want Google associating, Sellbrite Amazon, Sellbrite, and Amazon and this was the thing that, you know, you could you could do that with very easily. And then you can pass on some of the link equity from this over to some of those product listing pages, or whatever that might be. But you've at least established this significant hub that other people want to link to as a reference, because it's very helpful and beneficial for whatever article they're writing.

Brian Wallace 11:50

The Victor gets to write the history books, so why not be it?

William Harris 11:54

Absolutely. So, you know, this gets into a little bit of, let's just say, total addressable market is what you brought up. And I know that we've talked a little bit about total addressable market with chiropractors, you and I both have an affinity for them. I wrote an article on on entrepreneur about my chiropractor, just the genius level marketing that chiropractors do that sometimes goes unrecognized outside of that space. But tell me about how does this relate to chiropractic services?

Brian Wallace 12:21

Sure. So I've never read that article, you got to send it to me. Now, I'm kind of curious. But I'll focus on the task at hand. So I didn't like what we were talking before, in the case of Sellbrite third party seller services, and rolling that all the way up to the gigantic beast of Amazon. That's just still one level of abstraction to go. Because there is a market beyond the market, we could have gone even further away from Amazon. And we could have talked about e-commerce overall. But let's flip it to what you have accurately portrayed in the world of chiropractic. So I'm a firm believer in many markets, there's a total addressable market larger than what is already been identified as the total addressable market. So we've got this thing called chiropractic. There are many people on planet Earth, that do not go to the chiropractor, because they think it is crack science, think it's a joke thinks that they're not real doctors, you're going to get hurt, heard some story from their friends and family, whatever it is, there is what we'll just call this fuzzy cloud of hesitation and distrust. And instead of chiropractors addressing that, a lot of times, they're just trying to outrank each other from a local SEO basis are looking for a bunch of keywords. So let's say more than half of humanity, in whatever drivable area there is to your local chiropractor thinks that chiropractors are nonsense. Well, there is a larger market than whatever is going on. So if you can not only write the history books, but redefine the industry itself, and you really impact the level of the public's consciousness, to trust something in a different way than it thought, That is incredible. We've had some successes like that before.

William Harris 14:13

Yep. Well, and I think that's where, you know, when we talk about this from an advertising perspective, this comes down to let's just say in this in this context, the addressable market being people who are aware of let's say a need for a particular service or product and so let's say on e-commerce right and maybe this is some type of like high end subwoofer use, okay, you know, they, they're realizing that they need this sort of cooling in this and this is let's just say like non brand search, so that's, you know, maybe like the the market that people that are looking for this and they're ready for it, and they know that they need this, they don't know they need your product yet, but they know that they're looking for a subwoofer. Whereas you know, other people, they don't realize that they need the subwoofer yet. And so this is where you get to create that demand and oftentimes we're doing that on the ad side through You know, YouTube, or TikTok or Facebook or some other more discovery type program platform like that, where we're trying to help people to realize that they have a need for this. And then we can convert them, but we're creating a bigger market for it. And I think that's kind of more or less what you're saying with this, right? It's like, go beyond what you already know. And how do you create a bigger market for it?

Brian Wallace 15:22

I have a good example, if we want to bring it up on the screen. Yeah, that really gets into helping define a market. I'm putting it in our chat here. So you can share, if you want, we can move on to the point. But I think that this is a good literally illustrative example, that a lot of folks in their public consciousness, the wait, like, how do people even know what to think about something? Often, they just ask their friends and family, which honestly, is very incorrect and kind of idiotic a lot of times, because if you just ask your random cousin, how something is, and they've had probably a very small experience with that, unless they're literally an expert in it. What do they know? So we're torturing our friends and family with expert opinions about something that they don't have expertise on. And the rest of the time, we're probably just search, you're searching social, Google AI these days, maybe, but it's all pulling from some sort of source of authority. And let's just say the Google results are usually pretty good. So the problem is, is that if the public you've heard me say public consciousness a few times, but if the way that normal humans think about a product or a service, and it's incomplete or incorrect, they have very flawed thinking and how to make proper choices, because they probably don't know enough to make better choices. That's why it's very, like, particular example that you've got up on the screen. That's all about the psychology of color. So the TLDR too long didn't read version is, this is something that was done for a company that paints houses, and paints, offices, alright. So if you in any number of moment in time, incidences in your life, where you're having a baby moving, getting a new office, redoing a room, renovating whatever you own property, you can think of probably 20 different times that you might need a painter and you don't necessarily have the time or expertise to do it. So when you look all the way at the top of this, rather than saying, Our guys use better pain, and better brushstrokes, and all this nonsense that everybody competes on the bullet points and the ingredients, like we said before, let's educate people how to make better decisions for our products. So we were betting on the fact that most of humanity, unless you literally work for the Pantone Institute, or you're an interior designer, or you do something like very specific with color, why would you ever know anything about color psychology? Why would you know that? You know, blue makes people more productive, and yellow makes babies cry. I don't know why that that's such a relevant thing. But a lot of people seem to like that particular thing. And I'm not sure why we want to be redescribed. But moving on, sure. But as your tailor things through a little bit, then you can see it get a lot more into focus with things like accent colors, and stuff like that. So the week that this came out, I mean, it was absurd, like so many different places picked it up. And Google and Adobe, like, call this off hired us on the spot. They're like, we don't know what you did to the internet. But like, Yes, more of that, please. Because it's such a beautiful, concise way to get people to buy in and understand stuff. And I think this is a little bit less psychological strain to overcome, like a chiropractor, because this is just you having somebody come into your house and paint your house not cracking your back, still personal. So you're always going to have resistance to the new buyer to the new market. But when somebody says, I saved this, I pinned it on Pinterest, and I'm rewarding you because you educated me with my business. That's a wonderful thing that you could do. And I don't see why any particular market product service can't do something like this. I think we just get trapped in the our four walls incremental safe thinking, especially the larger we get.

William Harris 19:17

Yeah. And I think, you know, as I look at this, one of the things that I appreciate about this is like you said, This is a painting company, and you could see how, you know, they might think, well, there's no way for you know, painters of Louisville to go viral and to get links from tons of you know, top DEA authority websites and but this is how they do it. This is this is a way that they have the opportunity to get that that notoriety and that recognition. And that creates influence and influence is something that's I think very interesting. You know, I've talked about like the difference between influence versus even, you know, let's say respect or or there's another word that I think you like to use with this, and I'll maybe save that for you. But, you know, how, how does this? What do you think about when it comes to influence and what this is doing for brands.

Brian Wallace 20:10

So influence is a dangerous word, man. I don't think it started that way. But where we have ended up with it is a bit scary, because I could name and I don't really like to talk bad about individuals. But if I name specific people that were very influential, and they had all the proper checkmarks, and they had all the proper credibility, and then you invested in them, and then all your money was gone. And they went to jail for a long time. Or they threw, let's say, a large festival in the Bahamas, let's say, and then it never came to be. And they also went shale. People who are influential, have just jettisoned their responsibility for society to properly and carefully wield their influence. So I find that while influence the negative, the central neutral priming of that word, is quite useful. You want a brand to be influential, but really, you're saying that you want a brand to have influence. You don't want the people behind the brand, going to jail and being Ponzi scheme, and con artists and all of that. So unfortunately, too much of society that's looking for the quick wins, and damn the consequences and all of that stuff. We've taken over that word that a lot of you wouldn't say that many of these influencers are respected. So why would you want to go and build about all that influence without being respected? It seems absurd. If you can't trust someone, doesn't that influence go away, should influence something that's just a flash in the pan. That doesn't make any sense to me, because a lot of the world's most powerful brands have an incredible record. And, you know, long after we're dead and gone, they're probably going to be chiming away and still making a lot of money, okay, maybe their logo might change or whatever, and they might change their product mix. But authenticity, trust, likability, all of these things are a lot of the ingredients of the recipe of influence. But I think we almost need to just jettison that word and start with a new one. So the word that you were saying that I like is renown. So a lot of people have criticized me with this word, where they're like, oh, that's just like a renowned painter from the 1700. No, it's not. Many words have been around for a long time. But what I like about it is, instead of it being leaning neutral to negative, I think that this is neutral to more positive, it's saying that you have all of the influence, but can also be respected and trustworthy at the same time.

William Harris 22:44

Yeah, and I think that's key. And I think that that's where, you know, some of these examples of infographics, I've seen firsthand how that creates that, that influence in a positive light, where, you know, if you hire let's just say, random influencers who might have large followings, you can create some initial awareness for your brand for your product. But if they have issues and I'm gonna go with like an extreme one, right for the wall, I don't remember even the guy's name but the guy who was for subway there, right, where it's like, Well, hey, he came under fire for a little bit like that's, that's not necessarily renowned for your brand. But Let's even say on the smaller micro influencers, scale, there's a lot of influencers that may end up just be Hawking product, and that the people start to see through that pretty quickly, where it was like, Oh, this, this person may not even have ever used this product, but you paid them. And so now they're saying this, and that starts to come across as very detrimental to the brand or as somebody that's renowned, saying this, somebody that has influenced in respect and trust that makes, I think, for a bigger overall impact to that brand. And I think that that's where something like this infographic, or really good influencers can can have an illustration with this, because you're not just saying this is really good for you, you're proving it, you're proving that you understand the psychology behind what they're trying to accomplish and where they're trying to go. And you've put this out from like a very authoritative point of view.

Brian Wallace 24:13

Yeah, I just, I don't know, I feel like a lot of people are missing the point when it comes to all of this renowned respect, influence any of these different words, whatever we want to call it, each word has a little bit of different precision to it. I think that people are missing the point. So who are we trying to make famous and influential, the influencer, that we're just paying to post socially about our product and service, or us the brand that is trying to stand out from a lot of the noise? I think that we all imagine that we're going to our fever conference, the hype man before the main act comes out and says, Hey, everybody, let's make some noise. So we all want to go viral and make noise Sure, but it's the opposite. You want to make signal you want to stand out from all of this stuff. I think that if people especially in today's age, where a lot of the Used to be fancy publications are just absolutely going under because they never really figured out a revenue model to be honest. Why can't brands Why can't companies also be the media? Why can't they be influential? Why do we have to just borrow the audience's of these other places? Right. So I think it's just a different. And I'm not saying I'm not slamming influencer marketing, but I'm just saying, Why are we only borrowing their platform? When we should grow? What we're doing right now? Just bothers me.

William Harris 25:33

Yeah. And I'm affiliate of influencer marketing done well, and we do it here at Elumynt. And so there's, there's a lot of good things. But to your point, there's a difference between maybe what we've gotten into the commodity of influencer marketing versus truly being influential and renowned and creating that trust. What about if you are going to create that? So you talked about, like brands being the own version of their media? What do you think are the keys to success for brands creating, whether this is an infographic or whatever, to create renown for themselves? What are some of the keys for them to do this that need to be in place?

Brian Wallace 26:10

Yeah, I think that content is definitely the way to go. But that doesn't just mean, I wrote a blog, why isn't everybody showing up? Sure. Are you getting out there? Are you showing up at industry events? Are you there? When it comes to trade journals? Are you there for podcasts? Are people calling you out and interviewing you? Are you making less? Man, I mean, I think there's just like, there's a war chest of different tactics that I think you could have 100 Different people on the show, everybody's gonna have something different. So I think a lot of currency and trade is just sitting at the confluence of a lot of different things that never go together. Because if you just think about who we are in our DNA of what we teach, and how we get there, part of it is like a research institute, part of it's a design firm. And then part of it is just this weird, the hybrid of content, SEO, PR and journalism. So that's kind of a wild market that usually people just kind of focus on one of those things, I just don't see it that way, I think that a brand can absolutely stand out. And not just because they have a fancy CEO that everybody's ever heard of. And not just because they had a funding round show, it doesn't have to be immediate news base that doesn't have to be based on an election cycle doesn't have to be any of that you can be truly interesting. And valuable to the media. So it is part of it is writing on your site. Part of it is writing on other sites and being respected. If you have people that are executives, they could be thought leaders, key opinion leaders. So man, there's so much to say, when it comes to that, for sure.

William Harris 27:47

So we talked about some of the ways that people can be very, let's say, like, find really good impact and success from infographics and some of the things we talked about for that where, you know, making sure that you expand the TAM, the total addressable market in terms of like, what do you actually been trying to write about? Make sure that you put this in a context of being newsworthy, not just pigeon holed into the exact function that you're trying to solve? We talked about this really getting into the psychology and understanding of like human brain and putting this into it's not just, you know, grabbing a something free off of the internet have like a template for an infographic and just plugging in the holes. It's very thoughtful. But what's an example? Or what are some things pitfalls that people run into that you say, This is why infographics haven't worked for somebody in the past? They've tried it, and it didn't work? You know, what were the reasons why an infographic wouldn't be successful,

Brian Wallace 28:43

not letting us do our job telling us how well the creative works. Not having that longer play understanding. So a lot of folks will say, Look, this is exactly what we want you to put in it, we want it to look exactly like what all our other corporate PowerPoints want. And it's like, all of the media from an earned media capacity that we're not paying to be in our pocket is not going to just do me a solid, because you're not inspired, not creative thing that they've heard a million times over multiple times an hour as random email bomb pitches, ain't gonna pass. So when it comes to a lot of people from an SEO or PR perspective, I think a lot of people don't understand that you really need truly remarkable content that's on point and have relationships with people. You could not have a relationship and you might get lucky. But you're probably going to be noticed, amid the 1000s of emails that these poor people got day and night, when they've heard you and they remember. And by the way, it's a two way street. Right? Yeah. If I make content that's garbage, that they're going to feature and then their story sucks. What is their interest in helping me all the time? They might be wonderful, generous people. But let's say Now let's change that. Let's say I give them something that really is Amazing that they can wait to hear that they can feature that there can be a whole visual that they can add to their site. And then it's one of their best stories of the day. How about that? Right?

William Harris 30:09

Yeah. Well, and so if I was going to summarize this for people listening, at least in my own brain, part of this comes down to, if, if you had this designed very beautifully, but you buy it by designer, but you don't have those relationships built up with the media to be able to make sure that it actually gets seen and shared and linked to that's one of the downsides to it. One of the other things that people might run into from an issue standpoint here is, you know, trying to think of like the the best way to word it, but essentially, where you were saying, if people try to put together something that isn't newsworthy in height, that too much, then now that article isn't going to do well for that person. And so they're gonna say, Well, I'm not as interested in some of the other stuff you're doing because you tried to pigeonhole this into almost like a sales brochure versus something that's truly just helpful for them. And for the for the authors. So it's like you're really almost writing this for for the customers? Yes. But you're writing this almost for the, for the media publications as well, like those are almost like your customers to a point on this.

Brian Wallace 31:18

Oh, 1000 shot? Yeah, I mean, I think that what both sides of the equation value about us the most is the, the media does not want some horrible, heavy handed sales pitch. The second they see that, especially if you're a big company, they're gonna say, Oh, let me go bring that up with my business development team. And here's our advertising options, because they know it's an advertorial. Why are you bothering the editors? Right? So a lot of times the client wants that the publication is just getting pummeled with this stuff. And it doesn't make any sense, right? And then the client gets what they want in this case that instead, we're stopping them, it's like, no, we're not going to put your logo on it. 500 times. And no, we're not going to make the logo bigger. And it's not going to be right at the top because it's not a sponsorship. Right, stop telling everybody all the things that you think matter that they don't care about. If they were such experts in this, why would they need you? Sure, right? If they already knew everything about it, what are we even talking about, right? If they could just, you know, selling toaster ovens, and it's just so easy, and you just print out like a little thing that you cut out and you build a paper toaster? Well, that's probably not a good idea. But you just get a model for making a toaster oven. Why does everybody need you for nothing's that easy? When it comes down to it? And whatever product or service you're on? No,

William Harris 32:37

yeah, yeah, in for those who are listening, that are maybe newer TV, just like the SEO strategies, or things along those lines, when I think about link building, there, there are three main types of links that I tend to think about one being things that are just highly, highly authoritative. And this is let's just say, this is a link from, you know, entrepreneur, you know, domain authority of 9095, or 99, or whatever this might be like as high of domain authority as you can possibly get, then it might not be uber relevant to your core or your niche. But for instance, Wall Street Journal, you know, for the Sellbrite, one, that's not that necessarily, you know, targeted towards our niche of listings for e-commerce, but very, very high domain authority. Other ones are going to be the relevance to the niche that you're trying to do to the keywords that you're trying to be around. And so if Wall Street Journal has one thing about Amazon, and that's the one and only thing that they've ever written about Amazon, now, then, you know, Google already knows that that's not that, you know, necessarily beneficial to you from, you know, them linking to you from an Amazon perspective, but it's still got the domain authority, so it's fine. But whereas if that's something that, you know, every keyword on this particular page is about Amazon, and they happen to link to you from something about Amazon that has a significantly highly relevance there. And then there's just the volume of of links to and this is where there's some beneficial to, you know, just a lot of links, and there are pros and cons to that you obviously have to have these be the right kind of links, you don't want spam links, those are those are bad links. But when you combine all of these together, that's where I think the infographic was so beneficial in every situation that I've done with this, because if it's done in this context, you do get a volume of links. Some of them are highly relevant, some of them are not necessarily relevant, have high domain authority, and you Blend that all together. And it just creates a really nice, you know, landing pad for a lot of these other media outlets to link to in like you said, it's earned media. And if you're actually going to put like a number behind what it would cost to actually acquire a link from all of these different places, which I don't condone buying links just for saying, but I know that there are people out there that do where they say, Hey, you buy a link and you pay for this and you can get a link on this place and whatever that might be. But let's just even say you go beyond like the SEO value of the link and you try to do this from a advertorial standpoint, the cost that would be associated with this is significant. And this gives you the opportunity to get real earned, oftentimes follow through links from a lot of very good websites. And I think that that's very beneficial to brands that are continuing to build up their own individual domain authority.

Brian Wallace 35:14

Absolutely. And I think that goes hand in hand with being a media company. Because if we're looking at how authoritative the domain authority is, for all these publications, well, we should better be looking at how big the domain authority is of us. Sure. Because that's going to rise all the boats that's going to rise all of the future campaigns that we're launching off of our site, because if we're already killing it, from an SEO perspective, makes everything a lot easier going forward. Yeah,

William Harris 35:42

absolutely. I want to transition into the who is Brian Wallace, a little bit section of this? And what what, tell me about your life story, and why are you the way that you are? Why are you the person who says I can figure out the psychology of this? And also what needs to happen visually. And I mean, this is there's a lot of pieces coming together, the creative and the logical would follow through it. Why are you who you are?

Brian Wallace 36:12

Yeah, woof. Wow. Where do you even take that one? Sure. You know, why am I the way I am? I liked I think everybody says that they're like, special and different, or whatever. And kind of like what we're saying, like we were saying about, like publications and stuff before, like, everybody thinks that like, there's so news, news worthy and all that. I think I just think about stuff in a pretty different way than a lot of other people do. I think that I was always kind of labeled as gifted, and all that sort of stuff when I was very young, which is sort of like a blessing and a curse. Because it's just like, everybody's like our Savior, the smart guy. Like, I felt like there was like a lot of resentment from other children and adults. And we're just like, I'm sorry, am I not supposed to be smart? So I feel like a lot of my youth, I really was very introverted, and trying to deal with how to relate to other people like that. Because I'm not bragging. I'm just saying like, yeah, okay, fine. I mean, totally, people are like, Wow, you're so smart. I'm like, it's not even a compliment. It's like, okay, so and like, it's just a skill set. I didn't put it there. Like, I didn't do a bunch of reps at the gym, and I became smart. No, like, it's just something that was already there. So I have spent a lot of time trying to understand people and how people work and why people are the way that they are. So something I don't know if I've ever actually talked about this in any podcast interview. But let me talk about why I'm a little different from other people that, you know, please sit. Yeah, so I have a brother who is seven years younger than I am. And I don't know if he was like, sick before he was born. We never got like an actual diagnosis. But he is profoundly developmentally disabled, probably has the mental age of a six month old, doesn't know, and all that. So growing up, it was almost sort of like being an only child with an asterisk there, where there was sort of like all of the expectations for two children into one and oh, you're really smart. So go do everything and take over there. So there was a lot of like, insane pressure with all of that. So I think that, all of that and trying to make sense of that, as a little kid just gave me a very different childhood and maturity level than most people that you meet out there in the world. Sure. But yeah, I mean, a lot of other stuff happened to once upon a time my wife and I couldn't have children. And we had a medical procedure, and then our first child together, unfortunately, passed away. I like to explain, I can almost say that without like, crying these days. But one thing that I like to be very thankful about is neuroplasticity. Like, if you have a healthy brain that a lot of it can come back from something like that, because that's almost the equivalent of like driving into a tree or something. Right? So if you can overcome some of these different things, and I'm sure everybody listening has all sorts of traumas, all sorts of things that they've been to I don't think that I'm special in any regard like that. But I think it's how you emerge from stuff like that, that matters. So I think a lot of people probably it doesn't end very well when it comes to a lot of these different situations that I've unfortunately seen, I'm sure many of us have as well. So if you can walk through a lot of those things, I think that you can come out and do most anything after that because, you know, like a lot of people there Like, what are what's everybody's scared about? Right? Just public speaking is like, the scariest thing is revealed, like, but what's so hard about it? Like if you have expertise, and you have, let's say, a prepared PowerPoint presentation and some notes and you've rehearsed it, like, what's the worst that happens? When are they gonna throw tomatoes at you or something? Like, I'm sure, you've heard him saying, it's like a lot of when you get the perspective of some of these things, and you can really look back and say, wow, I've really achieved some stuff. After that just even going on as achieving, I think that it completely changes your world. I know that I mean, you worked in the health field before you even anything with marketing, and right. So I think that you've seen humanity up close, and you totally get it.

William Harris 40:43

I've seen things that I can't talk about, with most people, because I don't think that they even have the ability to go to that level. I've held the hand of numerous people as they've taken their last breath, I've felt life leaves the body. And that's a feeling that very few people have ever experienced that it's very difficult to even explain what that's like, but to be in people with their their last moments. To your point, this, you know, I've been through some pretty significant things as well. And I, you know, for everything that I've been through, I've also there are people who've been through significantly more than me, but you know, my daughter, my, my oldest, she's 13. Now, she, when she was 10, she essentially had, you know, not not a heart attack, but that's what you know, a lot of times doctors call it to help to help everybody understand, like, my wife would never understand. But she essentially a syncopal episode, she went into our size, and he said, effectively had no pulse basically, for about 10 minutes. And, you know, scariest moment of our life, she was more or less at that point dead. And, you know, absolutely wild, she was in the ICU for a long time. And now, that's just one of just a very small few things that we've been through, and there's so many things. But to your point, I've always said that, you know, you get to decide how you come out of each one of those situations. Kind of like what you're just setting it. And you can use that as a catalyst for positive growth and change, you can use that as an excuse to, you know, dive into all of the worst things that the world has to offer. And each person gets to decide that for themselves. And, you know, hopefully, I'll continue to make good choices with that. But I'm sure I've made my fair share of bad choices on that as well. And just kind of remembering to reframe that and move forward from those things and to be thankful for what you know, is here and what is in front of me and I yeah, I can, I can very much relate to a lot of what you're saying there. Something else you talked about, that I think is just interesting to bring up was the, you know, the IQ thing or the intelligence thing. And I appreciate that you just said you're like, look, it's not a bragging thing. There's just like, there's an objective reality to some of this too. And what's interesting, and I don't know if a lot of people can relate to this, or even are aware of this. But there's also some interesting research out there that I've seen, this suggests that once you get above a certain IQ or a certain intelligence level, your success rate tends to start dropping. And oftentimes, I think it's because there are difficulties in communication that take place and communication barriers between people being able to even be on the same page and understand what different people are talking about. And it's not necessarily that one is better or worse, but it's just recognizing that there are things that are objectively hard for people at certain intelligence levels. And I think that's a very interesting thing that I'm sure a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, maybe can appreciate as well that they sometimes feel like they're in a world of their own and sometimes difficult relating to some of the different things that are going around them whether they're exceptionally creative, exceptionally intelligent, exceptionally physically gifted somebody like LeBron James, right. Like sometimes there are these, these different things that make us unique and different, and sometimes can make it hard to to navigate those complexities. So

Brian Wallace 43:58

I think a lot of people, that's a very good point. And I've seen similar research, I don't remember what the IQ number is, and it doesn't matter. But once you achieve over x, let's say whatever number of standard deviations from the norm, you almost lose touch with objective reality of what I find interesting. And the only stuff that you find interesting is the 1% of the 1% have like these really specialized things and other people are like, What are you even talking about? I don't even understand what this thing that you're talking about it. So there's such a massive disconnect. So you really have to do a good job, studying people. But again, like everybody, to your point of athletic intelligence, everyone has intelligence and everybody has their part to play in the world. So when people get all egotistical and smug about it, I think that's one of the worst things I see. Yeah, everyone has intelligence. Everyone is smart in something. I'm really really bad at lots of stuff.

William Harris 44:52

Absolutely. You don't want not agree with you being that stuff. I'm saying I'm also really bad stuff, too. Yes. You can

Brian Wallace 44:57

agree with being bad at it. Sure. Yeah, we're all Lots of things, we're only good at best at a few things. That's it. Yeah,

William Harris 45:05

sure. It reminds me of an I don't remember who made the comic, but something along the lines. And I don't know if this was even really, truly something that Einstein said. But something along the lines of if you know, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree or something like that, right, but there is that idea that it's like, we all have different gifts, and some of them are ones that we've established measurements for. And some of them, we have not established measurements for and in recognizing that everybody has their gifts and their talents, and we all have something to learn from every single person is really good. And you mentioned just the idea of being relatable. That's something else I feel like you and I have talked about, too, you have the ability, a unique ability of being able to gain, like intimacy with people and not necessarily like romantic intimacy, just intimacy with people quickly. How what like, what are some of the secrets to being able to do that?

Brian Wallace 45:54

Yeah, I think that I need to write a book about I have some notes for books about this. And I really probably should get around to this for longer form explanation of what you're asking. Because I don't know that everyone can be incredible at it, because that's how bell curves work. But everybody can be a lot better at it. And I think that if you were better at you, but if everyone listening could be better at it, they would have a much better life, and they wouldn't be so miserable, trying to get people to listen and all that. I think one of the big things that people miss on this very frequently, unless they're naturally primed toward it is generosity. So if you meet somebody, and you're immediately going into sales pitch bingo, so it's like, well, who should go first explaining what was your verbal? It's like, whoa, slow down. Like, maybe that's not really the way to meet people. If you want to only geek out about people as transactional beings? Well, there's a lot of good psychotherapy books that you could read about that I just finished reading games people play, which was written in the 60s. It's a fascinating way of looking at the world. And being kind of sad, because people follow these very predictable transactional games. And there's a better real game at life, which is being generous. Bob Berg, who wrote The Go Giver, and has a whole series of books on this talks about giving without expectation of return, which I said to him once when I was interviewing him, and he's like, No, not exactly that. It's more like giving without expectation of return on that particular transaction. Because if you keep giving, it will come back to you. Because that really is how the world works. And I know that there's a lot of people that are skeptic of that. And they're like, Well, what's in it for me? Why should I give and I'm thinking, well, first off, not a good luck, bro. Like that's, that's kind of a scary little mantra, you've got there. But it actually does work. Because why am I going to go out of my way to know like, trust and buy from somebody I didn't know from yesterday? Like, how many cold calls and cold emails and cold DMS you get in a day, William? Tons of them, right? Oh, my gosh,

William Harris 48:06

yeah, he's more than I can count. No, right. Do

Brian Wallace 48:09

you trust them? Like, never right, like me be if something is like really exceptional, and you need it right now? Or the, you know, you're not going to turn away the emergency plumber as like your toilet is just, you know, totally on the frets. Sure I got that. But for all this other stuff, if you can't build that trust and intimacy quickly, and generosity is one of the wonderful ways to do it. But not generosity is a tactic, right? So I'm not just generous with strings, where it's like, well, I'm gonna give this little

William Harris 48:39

thing we've all experienced that person, too. That's

Brian Wallace 48:42

right. Right. It's very obvious when people are just following the directions of a step by step and actually mean. So I guess, I guess, all that to say, be generous and actually mean it. And if you don't really see that, there's a lot more work I think you need to do on yourselves. Because every day is a gift you're

William Harris 49:03

And just so you guys know, I always ask everybody what their goal is on the podcast when they go to join the podcast. And Brian, I don't know if you remember what you wrote. I'm gonna read it to everybody right now, this is normally not public. You said just being with you and sharing ideas to the world. This is Brian, like, literally his goal for the podcast is like, Hey, I just want to share some helpful stuff and see if that's helpful to somebody. And I've seen that in you. Because I've known you now for almost a decade. And, and I've absolutely seen that through you. And like you said, this is just the way the world works. You and I have had good chats about religion and spirituality and things like that. And so if I can, you know, maybe go on the spot a little bit and presuppose some things. I believe that you know, there is a God who created the universe and the same God who created the laws of gravity, which no one can escape. I mean, we have our ways of changing some things with that. But I mean, we were bound to this I also created rules, let's say that that go along with generosity as well. And, and I'd say that, you know, in the Bible, it talks about you reap what you sow. I would say that in other religions, they even talked about, like karma. And so I think that there is something that is understood inherently as if like, Hey, this is practically how things work. And we may not necessarily understand the science behind it yet, but I think that maybe we will one day and, and I like string theory, and maybe there's something to be said about just the way that your actions and intentions have to do with vibrating strings in one dimension. And how that literally does create resonance with different things that have the same resonant frequency. Like we can go very metaphysical with it. I don't know necessarily that I need to explain it. But the reality is, I agree with you that there's something about the way the world works, and just being somebody who is able to wake up grateful, go to bed grateful and be genuinely helpful to people that that is remarkable. Yep.

Brian Wallace 50:57

Yeah, I too, am a person of faith. You don't usually hear me talk too much about it on the internet, because I feel like sometimes people should get the wrong way. They think that I am pushing it on them. So you'll hear me usually talk things more in a universalized fashion. So I will say that I think that if religion is so good, and science is so good, shouldn't they just harmonize well guess what a lot of times they do if you actually look to see that lots of things are much more connected than other things. So I think that regardless of one's religion, religiosity or not, I think that everyone can see the benefits of generosity and abundance. I think that you make yourself a very small unapproachable world when you don't.

William Harris 51:38

Yeah, I think I'm right there with you, Brian, this has been so incredibly wonderful talking to you. And there's so much more that I'd love to get into. But I do want to make sure that we're respectful of time. If people wanted to follow you connect with you work with you, what's the best way for them to reach out?

Brian Wallace 51:55

Sure. Our website is NowSourcing.com And since there's probably 1000s and 1000s of Brian Wallace's all over the internet, although I think I finally outrank them, you know, links and SEO rate success onion, all the socials at NowSourcing but once in a while just for Brian Wallace as well. That's awesome.

William Harris 52:17

Yeah, yes, yes. And I follow you on LinkedIn as well. Brian, I appreciate this. Thanks for coming, sharing your ideas, thoughts with us here and everybody. Thanks for joining in and I hope you all have a great day.

Outro 52:30

Thanks, William. Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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